In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is to [sic] out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.

There is, presumably, no special reason why a society in which males are dominant in family relationships is to be preferred to a matriarchal arrangement. However, it is clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be operating on one principle, while the great majority of the population, and the one with the most advantages to begin with, is operating on another. This is the present situation of the Negro. Ours is a society which presumes male leadership in private and public affairs. The arrangements of society facilitate such leadership and reward it. A subculture, such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage.

Doro is an ideal consumer who is both part of a “race,” “nation,” or “empire” (those terms being as confused and intertwined for Doro as they were for Burroughs) and its predator. This depiction of Doro highlights the ways in which a hyper-extended consumerism and an exceptionalist definition of nation both necessarily bring with them a permanent underclass—without which the empire would collapse—both feeding and being destroyed by those in the dominant position, and who themselves also work to maintain and expand the people/nation/empire itself. The history of racism that lurks in the background of the Moynihan Report is here revealed. The economic and other oppressions of the African American population are not indirect results of an amorphous history of externally applied oppression that leads to an internal communal “pathology,” which in turn can be “corrected” only by the dominant culture, as Moynihan would have it, but is rather a direct and continuous requirement of the continued stability of white, upper-class dominance. Butler thus exposes the liberal evasions of the Moynihan Report and the logic that undergirds it.

[...]

Butler, however, shows that the white and patriarchal social pattern, because it relies on the maintenance of certain other patterns, is itself pathological.22 And, because of its reliance on its necessary abjected other, this dominant pattern can actually be overtaken or rewritten into a dominant black matriarchal society.